International Women’s Day: Free markets are not the enemy of feminism
History tells that if there’s one thing women should fear, it’s not capitalism, it’s the collective, says Victoria Bateman
Leftist global histories tell the same story when it comes to women. They present us with a happy world in which women were revered and rewarded by their communities until the advent of capitalism ended this utopia. From Friedrich Engels to Silvia Federici, we are told that growing commercialisation left women exploited, vulnerable and penniless. Even witchcraft trials – the craze that tragically left tens of thousands of women drowned or burned at the stake – have been blamed on capitalism. In my latest book Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth & Power, I present a fresh economic history of the world, one which reveals the true culprit of women’s economic marginalisation in the past: not free markets but, instead, the collective. Throughout history, it was trade unions, guilds and professional societies – collectives of men – that were responsible for locking women out of the most lucrative opportunities. Conversely, it was free markets – the forces that underpin capitalism – that instead came to their rescue.
Contrary to popular opinion – and to set the record straight at the outset – business has never been “just for men”. For every Henry Ford or JP Morgan there has been a female equivalent who was equally as smart, hard-working and inventive. History is, in fact, packed full of successful female merchants and entrepreneurs. But (for reasons we could debate) these women have failed to become household names, creating a false impression of the past: that companies were only ever founded and run by men. This notion – that business has only ever created opportunities for half of the population – is one of the most fundamental strings in the anti-capitalist bow, one that is frequently used in attempts to sway women towards socialism. After all, why would you support a system if it doesn’t give you the same opportunities as your male peers? It is perhaps, therefore, of little wonder that leftist historians have typically chosen to ignore women’s efforts in the field of business, painting them as victims rather than as active wealth-creators.
More than housewives
As I show in Economica, once you start to look, evidence of female entrepreneurship can be found throughout history’s dusty archives. Business cards from eighteenth century London – now safely housed at the British Museum – reveal numerous female shoemakers, toy makers, fan makers, tea sellers and printers. Female-run businesses could be found on every street and lane of the capital. And while London’s banking houses were dominated by men, it was a woman, Priscilla Wakefield, who was busy taking banking to the people, setting up England’s first “penny savings bank” for women and children in Tottenham in 1798. In fact, Wakefield’s savings accounts were so popular that local men lobbied her to extend her services to men. While Georgian Britain might bring to mind a Bridgerton-style world of “tradwives”, a woman’s pamphlet from the era warned women of marriageable age that “none but a fool will take a wife whose bread must be earned solely by his labor and who will contribute nothing toward it herself”. Georgian women were so much more than housewives.
In fact, the housewife was a product not of the Georgians but of the Victorians. This was the era of the Industrial Revolution – one of chimneys that reached high into the sky and steam that billowed backwards from the front of trains as they chuffed and puffed through our green and pleasant land – but also the era of “dark satanic mills” with their long working days and unsafe conditions which – understandably – gave rise to the trade union movement. But while much ink has been expended detailing the valiant working class heroes who fought for higher wages, their sacrificial victims – women – have been conveniently erased from history.
Male trade unionists realised that they could use their collective power to halve the competition that they faced in the job market if they excluded women from the workforce and so pressured employers, under threat of strike action, to stop employing women. This plan worked: in 1808, the hatters of Stockport won their fight with their employers to exclude women from hat making, as, two years later, did bookbinders. By 1820, cotton spinners in Glasgow and Manchester had followed suit, and in Lancashire, male spinners went even further, using their collective power to insist that their employers didn’t even employ other men unless they were a son, brother or nephew of a current spinner. In London, in 1834, tailors also went on strike to exclude women from their trade. As one exasperated woman exclaimed in The Pioneer: “Surely the men might think of a better method of benefiting themselves than that of driving so many industrious women out of employment. Surely, while they loudly complain of oppression, they will not turn oppressors themselves.” But, rather than admitting that greed and self-interest were at the root of their demands, unions portrayed their actions as both protecting women from workforce exploitation and preventing the neglect of children. Thanks to this supposed male benevolence, women who out of economic necessity continued to work were left with the crumbs while the remainder of their sex assumed the dutiful role of the housewife.
While trade unionists laid waste to women’s employment in mills, workshops and factories, collectives of middle class men did the same when it came to office work
While trade unionists laid waste to women’s employment in mills, workshops and factories, collectives of middle class men did the same when it came to office work. As the Victorian economy boomed, businesses became more complex, resulting in greater demand for professional personnel and an explosion in white-collar work. Across the professional landscape – from accountancy to law – organisations sprung to life to act as the gatekeepers to the learned professions. And, as they acquired their Royal Charters – granting them the right to set standards within their profession – many chose to exclude women until in 1919 the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act made it illegal to refuse admission to any incorporated society, or appointment to a civil or judicial post or profession, on the basis of sex.
When we look at low-income countries today, we see a similar picture to that of Victorian Britain: men conspiring to lock women out of the most lucrative forms of formal employment. It shouldn’t be all that surprising, therefore, that an incredible 88 per cent of working women in low-income countries are self-employed, compared with only ten percent of women in high-income countries. And while one in three businesses across the world are now owned by women, in East Asia and South America it is one in two. It is by working for themselves and setting up their own businesses that women in some of the poorest parts of the world are able to feed themselves and their families. Rather than failing women, markets – the freedom to truck, barter and trade – are often their only means of survival.
Entrepreneurship is not – and never has been – just for men. It’s time to confront a leftist vision of the past that not only denies women’s historic contributions in the field of business but blames capitalism for sins that were not of its making. What women truly have to fear isn’t free markets and free enterprise – it is the collective.
Dr. Victoria Bateman is an economic historian, historical consultant and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her latest book – Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth & Power – was an FT Best Book of 2025